Willem de Kooning by Dan Budnik

de Kooning's

women

ILLEM DE KOONING IS ONE of three major figures in modern art to have come out of Holland. All three settled abroad. But while van Gogh and Mondrian did some of their most important work at horte, de Kooning emigrated to the United States as soon as he left art school at the age of twenty-one. The year was 1926, a time when more artists were leaving the U.S. for Europe than were arriving. Twenty years later, with the rise of abstract expressionism, New York began to assume its present dominant role in art, a role largely made possible by Jackson Pollock, Hans Hofmann and Willem de Kooning. De Kooning first achieved widespread notoriety in 1953, when he exhibited a series of paintings and pastels of women mostly single figuresdone over the previous three years. These works shocked the bourgeoisie with their violence, and the avant-garde was appalled at de Kooning's commitment to sufch a traditional subject. In the second half of the 1950's, de Kooning did no paintings of women, but only abstractions, often with references to landscapes. In 1961, he did a series of small Women paintings, all of a single standing nude. In 1964, he began a new series, which has continued to the present, with poses more varied and more overtly erotic than before. In the following paragraphs, David Sylvester questions de Kooning about hisconscious great controversial series of the ? early SYLVESTER: Are you of your European formation 1950'S. THE EDITORS DE KOONING: No, I'm not conscious of it at all. That is all over. It's not so much that I'm an American; I'm a New Yorker. You know, I think we have gone back to the cities and I feel much more in common with an artist in London, you know, or Paris. It is a certain burden, this American-ness. If

you come from a small nation, you don't have that. When I went to the Academy and I was drawing from the nude, / w a s making the drawing, not Holland, do you see what I mean? Now it is getting a little bit of a bore; I feel sometimes that an artist must feel like a baseball player or something, a member of a team writi ng American history. When you started to paint tlie Women, you were doing something much more overtly figurative than any of the other so-called action painters or abstract expressionists had been doing. You must have felt you were out on a bit of a limb ? Yes, they attacked me for that, certain artists and critics, but I felt this was their problem, not mine. I don't really feel hke a non-objective painter at all. Some painters feel they have to go back to the figure, and that word "figure," that becomes such a ridiculous omen. In a way, if you pick up some paint with your brush and make somebody's nose with it, this is rather ridiculous, when you think of it, theoretically or philosophically. It's really absurd to make an image, like a human image, with paint, today, since we have this problem of doing or not doing it. But then all of a sudden it becomes even more absurd not to do it. So I fear that I'll have to follow my desires. Thafs to say, when you started to do the Women, it wasn't because you'd made a theoretical decision, as some painters have, to "return to the figure"? It was just a desire? Yes. It had to do with the female painted through all the ages, all those idols. And maybe I'd been stuck to a certain extent, couldn't go on. And it did one thing for me: it eUminated composition, arrangement, relationships, lightI mean all this silly talk about light, color and form, you know because there was this thing I wanted to get hold of. I put it in the center of the canvas because there was no reason to put it a bit on the side. So I thought I might as well stick to the idea that it's got two eyes, a nose and mouth and neck.

An Interview by David Sylvester

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Woman II, 1952